Abstract

Filesystems, as a fundamental component of operating systems that enables management of data, are becoming increasingly important. With the rapid development of network, storage hardware and computational power, the requirements for filesystems have vastly changed in different ways, leading to the great variety. It is, however, non-trivial to understand the differences between these filesystems and to make the right decision concerning which to use.

In this talk I shall introduce three modern filesystems: FAT32 , Ext4 and ZFS , by talking about their design choices and implementations, as well as advantages and potential pitfalls. I shall compare these three filesystems in their features supported, ability to retain data safety, and performance.

After the talk you should have a basic understanding of what features the three example modern filesystems are able to provide, how they differ, and where they should be deployed to best suit the application.